Congrats to WordPress.com on a million!

Matt Mullenweg announces that there’s now a million WordPress.com blogs and they are throwing a party in SF tomorrow night. That’s really great, I love WordPress.com. It’s been a great service so far and one that I enjoy using a lot. I’ll try to get to the party, but that depends on planes running on time and all that. Either way, I’ll be there in spirit and can’t wait to see what WordPress.com does next.

The dirty little secret of WordPress? It’s audience per blog is much higher than Microsoft’s Live Spaces, for instance. The audience that hangs out on WordPress is a lot more engaged, too, and I believe that blogs on WordPress.com get more than their fair share of Google traffic. Matt told me that more than half of the traffic that comes to WordPress.com comes from Google — the HTML is automatically SEO’d (optimized for search engines).

Either way, it’s a service I recommend to any blogger who wants a free service to blog on.

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Published by Robert Scoble

Chief Strategy Officer at Infinite Retina. https://infiniteretina.com
The Spatial Computing (AR/VR/AI) Agency that helps entrepreneurs with their AR/VR projects and companies.
View all posts by Robert Scoble

Yeah, SEO on Windows Live Spaces is awful. Their overall service has improved so much over recent months (and has got a lot of my non-techy friends into Blogging/uploading photos etc) but the SEO still fails.

I use Writer to duplicate my Blog to WL Spaces (I love the social contacts here with my Messenger List/Xbox friends list) and to my own Blogger blog hosted on my server and Google gives much more weight to the latter (not unsurprisingly).

Yeah, SEO on Windows Live Spaces is awful. Their overall service has improved so much over recent months (and has got a lot of my non-techy friends into Blogging/uploading photos etc) but the SEO still fails.

I use Writer to duplicate my Blog to WL Spaces (I love the social contacts here with my Messenger List/Xbox friends list) and to my own Blogger blog hosted on my server and Google gives much more weight to the latter (not unsurprisingly).

Chris…my thoughts exactly. Having a party because they reached 1 million different directories on the server…that’s a little nuts. Generally, when you hear marketing statements like this in the industry, it’s time to re-evaluate the source. In most cases, the company is in trouble in some fashion or another and they’re only trying to save themselves through creative marketing. I’ve seen a lot of acquisitions happen about 6 months after fluff like this as they try to pad the portfolio.

Chris…my thoughts exactly. Having a party because they reached 1 million different directories on the server…that’s a little nuts. Generally, when you hear marketing statements like this in the industry, it’s time to re-evaluate the source. In most cases, the company is in trouble in some fashion or another and they’re only trying to save themselves through creative marketing. I’ve seen a lot of acquisitions happen about 6 months after fluff like this as they try to pad the portfolio.

“It would be really interesting to see some stats on the last login time of those 1 million users.”

This is true, activity is trickier to measure, but I’m fine making anything we track public, we really don’t have anything to hide. We recently started tracking logins and that seems to be about 531k a week. The “million” number isn’t users though, which we have about 1.1 million of, but public blogs. Activity is different with blogs because even if one doesn’t get an update, they still often get traffic and comments. Is that active? I’m not sure.

“And indeed they do, and eternally decry 3rd party stats, and while 3rd party stats aren’t perfect, and sometimes hard to trust, I trust self-directed stats even less.”

I’m fine with third-party stats, there are even some publicly available on us at Quantcast – http://quantcast.com/wordpress.com . We check our internal stat numbers against Google Analytics to make sure nothing is broken, and that’s what we publish.

“You have X many millions from VC. You want an excuse to throw a party that you can fully stick at the investor money.”

Unfortunately we’re fairly frugal in that regard. This is the first WordPress party we’ve had in two years, and we’re doing it on a Monday night so there are no bar minimums and we don’t have to pay anything to use the venue. And it’s a dive bar. 🙂

“It would be really interesting to see some stats on the last login time of those 1 million users.”

This is true, activity is trickier to measure, but I’m fine making anything we track public, we really don’t have anything to hide. We recently started tracking logins and that seems to be about 531k a week. The “million” number isn’t users though, which we have about 1.1 million of, but public blogs. Activity is different with blogs because even if one doesn’t get an update, they still often get traffic and comments. Is that active? I’m not sure.

“And indeed they do, and eternally decry 3rd party stats, and while 3rd party stats aren’t perfect, and sometimes hard to trust, I trust self-directed stats even less.”

I’m fine with third-party stats, there are even some publicly available on us at Quantcast – http://quantcast.com/wordpress.com . We check our internal stat numbers against Google Analytics to make sure nothing is broken, and that’s what we publish.

“You have X many millions from VC. You want an excuse to throw a party that you can fully stick at the investor money.”

Unfortunately we’re fairly frugal in that regard. This is the first WordPress party we’ve had in two years, and we’re doing it on a Monday night so there are no bar minimums and we don’t have to pay anything to use the venue. And it’s a dive bar. 🙂